This exhibition brings together four artists who are thinking about origins, process, materials, and labour as they explore the possibilities and implications of working digitally.

At the heart of Trace • Copy • Render is a shared interest in revealing, hiding, and playing with digital and material processes and manipulations, and the coincidence or disconnect (as the case may be) between final output and the myriad steps involved in the process of its realization.

Alex Fischer is an artist whose practice deliberately blurs and confounds the borders between media, and constitutes digital-image making as an extension of traditional artistic media and concerns. He uses advanced digital imaging techniques to manipulate found source imagery, to layer and build-up complex new compositions that are often hard to pin down as to medium or process, and which maintain a tension between the physical and the virtual, the original and the copy, the index and the trace.

In a fascinating inversion of his work on the computer, Fischer just as easily jumps out from the digital realm—off the virtual canvas—and performs ‘photoshop’ by physically copying, tracing, blending, adding layers and various effects to printed and painted works. Fischer’s series of work in Trace • Copy • Render offers a self-reflexive glimpse into his process of creation and concerns and includes paintings, projections, and prints.

– Claire Sykes, August 2016

Thistlee Keeper, one of three 17×21¼inch prints from digital collage

Wave V, one of ten 11×14inch prints from photograph of oil paint and projected light

Willow Fire, one of ten 11×14inch prints from photograph of oil paint and projected light

With Picabia's Hand, one of ten 11×14inch prints from photograph of oil paint and projected light

With Picabia's Hand, (Earlier) one of ten 11×14inch prints from photograph of oil paint and projected light

(1)

On the occasion of Alex Fischer's fourth solo exhibition with O'Born Contemporary, he problematizes the single image by its very conversion into multiple, nearly identical forms. A digital original is here reproduced as 1 digital print, 7 large oil paintings, and 6000 small acrylic paintings. Through this multi-modal exhibition, Fischer deliberates on the nature of art with its value systems and capitalist patrimony.

Current agricultural trends demonstrate that when tomatoes are grown, the aim is to direct natural processes, taking agency over evolution. Like all biological species, the tomato plant contains a genetic copy of itself inside every cell of its being. Repetition and versioning are as much a rule in agriculture as they are in human life. Conversely, uniqueness and independence of mind are selling points when it comes to art. There is an established value in originality.1

(7)

Each of the 7 oil paintings was completed by an equal number of painters working in Xiamen, China. Fischer puts the work of these trained hands in direct visual argument with the mechanically reproduced print: he suggests deliberation about the capitalist mechanism and simultaneously entertains his moral ambiguity within this landscape of unapologetic consumptive socio-culture.

The controversy here may be in the fact that Fischer criticizes the capitalist system by highlighting elements that are uncomfortable to acknowledge while fully engaging with capitalism's ideologies through the kaleidoscope of fine art and its market. He grows the pieces, puts them under optimal lighting, and creates versions at price points to invite the viewer to buy.

(6000)

An arched shelf bolsters 6000 small sheets of thin, transparent plastic. Hundreds have already been painted, revealing that they exist as an assemblage of tiles that, when properly arranged, mimic their parent image. Fischer will paint the remaining sheets on demand as they are requested and will continue this practice alongside his other projects.

Artwork as a commodity is not valuable per se– its value is the result of an ongoing and never ending social negotiation. That being said, the work of art, and painting specifically, is an object that bears a concrete, almost measurable evidence of labour on its surface.2 Paintings are worked over and leave a trace of the individual mark maker. Each edition in 1, 7, and 6000 shows on its surface the inevitable difference made during translation between parent image and end product. Each image is the real thing.

– Alex Fischer, February 2015

1. This idea is commensurate with remarks issued by Ben Davis: It is the uniquely middle-class nature of creative labor in the visual arts [that] would seem to explain its alternative emphasis on the individual, that is, on the virtues of personality and small production, as well as a whole host of other stylistic tics and affectations(...) visual art's characteristic questioning or ironic attitude; the value of the artist's signature and the "artist's statement" that are associated with it. Davis, Ben. 9.5 Theses on Art and Class - Commerce and Consciousness. Chicago:Haymarket Books, 2013. PDF file.

In Dry Pixels and Wet Molecules Alex Fischer counter-poses the primordial origins of biology against today's dominant technology-based vernacular. In earnest, the artist acknowledges through his practice elements peculiar to the time of his being. Put in alternative terms, Fischer concedes that the acts of being and becoming are wholly different now than at any time in our recent or distant past.

Dry Pixels and Wet Molecules poses a valuable and contemporary question using sensory terms--can the digital reconcile with the physical? The works of art comprising this materially varied exhibition reveal themselves as both answers to and instigators of this question. Through digital manipulations, sculpture, and installation, Fischer convinces his audience that technology is not simply an imbricate to the physical and the palpable but rather supersedes both.

The multi-modal moment in which art-making has found itself produces what could be called moist media, a curious but worthwhile corollary to the McLuhan's cold media of days past. Absorbing this idea, Fischer wedges himself between the dry, cold of the pixel and the wetness of biomolecules. Ultimately suggesting that we are living in a post-digital world, the artist exposes a tactility and precision with his imagery that in effect surpasses the daily surroundings we perceive with our own eyes and bodies.

Statement

As a visual artist, I work on the frontier of expanded painting. This means that a riot of possible techniques and subjects are considered when working on a single piece. I practice a continuous reflexivity in order to address and critique the different psychological rationales and cultural schools of thought that history has provided. Working similarly to an abstract expressionist I layer and discover compositions through the creative process, one that coincides with what R.G. Collingwood described as not expressing the unknown, but discovering the unknown.

I’m interested in painting specifically, as an object that bears a concrete, almost measurable evidence of labour on its surface. To develop these ideas, I use advanced digital image editing techniques to map out complex compositions. Essentially, I make images that blur the borders between media, challenge expectations, and let me enter into conversations about our culture and nature.

Paramount to all of this is an endeavour to engage audiences by making images that can seduce into contemplation both the naive glance and an informed critical gaze. I believe art can be a catalyst for making people aware of how perceptive they are already. The act of looking is all that is required.